Lynn Hollen Lees

The making of urban Europe, 1000-1994

Introduction: Urdanization in Perspective PART I: The Preindustrial Age: eleventh to Fourteenth Centuries 1. Structure and Functions of Medieval Towns 2. Systems of Early Cities 3. The Demography of Preindustrial Cities PART II: The Industrial Age: Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries 4. Cities in the Early Modern European Economy 5. Beyond Baroque Urbanism PART III: The Industrial Age: Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries 6. Industrial and the Cities 7. Urban Growth and Urban Systems 8. The Human Consequences of Industrial Urbanization 9. The Evolution and Control of Urban Space 10. Europes Cities in the Twentieth Century Appendix A: A Cyclical Model of an Economy Appendix B: Size Distributions and the Ranks-Size Rule Notes Bibliography Index

International Management in a Free-Standing Company: The Penang Sugar Estates, Ltd., and the Malayan Sugar Industry, 1851–1914

Although free-standing companies helped facilitate international capital flows in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their ability to operate effectively over the long run in a global economy has been questioned. This essay looks at one free-standing company, the Penang Sugar Estates, Ltd., in British Malaya to assess its managerial performance and strategies for transferring information. Through diversification, subcontracting, reorganization, and increased tolerance for local knowledge, the firm surmounted the information asymmetries that gave trouble during its early decades and increased profits. The Malayan sugar industry benefited from its imperial location, which brought significant advantages.

Discipline and delegation: colonial governance in Malayan towns, 1880-1930

British colonial administrators had two strategies for governing towns in Malaya during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They used Sanitary Boards to improve public health and to control populations indirectly, and they relied on police forces for direct forms of discipline. Both strategies reveal the overall weakness of the British colonial regime in that region.

The challenge of political change: urban history in the 1990s

Urban history is a rapidly expanding, flourishing field in Europe. Nevertheless, urban scholars would do well to re-examine the paradigms within which they have been working as the field today lacks central questions and general interpretive models. Moreover, the common focus on urban biography or upon one region within a single nation-state has become increasingly outmoded, given the international scale of economic processes and migration flows. More attention to topics treated within a European-wide or even international context is needed. In addition, urban history as currently defined is tilted towards social and economic concerns to the neglect of the political arena.

The study of social conflict in English industrial towns

The problem of social conflict is central to the historiography of nineteenth-century cities. Since Friedrich Engels wrote his powerful indictment of social relations in English industrial towns, urban historians have told and retold tales of dramatic struggles between workers and their middle-class employers. Whether seen from a Marxist or non-Marxist perspective, the standard books on social life in industrial towns abound with strikes, demonstrations, confrontations, and other more subtle signs of conflict. A. Temple Patterson and Malcolm Thomis depict the often tumultuous responses of Leicester and Nottingham framework knitters to their economic decline. Accounts of urban Chartism regularly link workers’ economic and social demands to strong middle-class disapproval and disavowal within a local context. Books on the 1830s and 1840s are particularly rich in incidents of confrontation, but the growing literature on the late nineteenth century also emphasizes this theme. Gareth Stedman Jones places middle-class misconceptions and fears at the centre of his analysis of casual labour in London, and Robert Greys discussion of Edinburgh artisans assumes the reality of class conflict as a determinant of urban social relations. Nevertheless our understanding of divisions among urban social groups and of the relationships of one group to another remains primitive and unsatisfactory.

Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200-1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society (review)

Social history, particularly in its demographic variant, has become unfashionable, but Lynch’s impressive, interpretive synthesis of research on urban history and on demographic history demonstrates the central importance of these aelds for understanding the issues posed by major social theorists of European society. Her work stakes out a large territory both in time and space—England east to the German states and south through Spain and Italy from 1200 until the decades of industrialization and demographic transition after 1800. Weber’s analysis of western cities, along with the work of Laslett, Hajnal, and Swaan set the theoretical framework for the study.1 Lynch identiaes the key demographic structures—migration, high mortality, relatively late marriage, small households—that shaped popular life in European towns, adding an analysis of religious ideals and social forms, which, she argues, encouraged individuals to seek “bonds of association” that extended beyond kin networks (68). In settings shaped by Christian values and institutions, where plebians lived in nuclear families, communities such as confraternities and beguinages substituted for missing kin and also assumed welfare functions. In these settings, family was a oexible concept that covered public as well as private relationships. Demography encouraged the growth of civil society, which provided entitlements to members of carefully deaned communities. Lynch’s benign picture of urban social relations is tempered by acknowledgment of those who were excluded from communal assistance, but her study rejects the disciplinary arguments of Foucault in favor of a liberal view of welfare institutions and civic relationships.2 Lynch also points out how issues of gender shaped community building. Because urban populations had disproportionate numbers of females who played important roles in many trades, both skilled and unskilled, city elites had to come to terms with unattached women, competitive women, and poor women. She stresses the high degree of autonomy granted to urban females who, even if excluded from some craft guilds, joined voluntary organizations and, as beguines and beatas, ran communities for themselves outside kin-based households. Her work identiaes medieval and early modern variants of maternalist activities through the medium of “a religiously-inspired ‘public mother628 | LYNN HOLLEN LEES

The Making of Urban Europe 1000-1950

Urbanization in Europe from the year 1000 to 1950 is reviewed. The work is primarily a study in economic and social history but considerable emphasis is given to the demographic and geographic aspects of Europes urban development over time. The approach is chronological with parts devoted to the preindustrial age the proto-industrial age from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries and the industrial age. (ANNOTATION)